Neverwinter: Looking into Elemental Evil

Hi folks, my name is Scott Shicoff and I have recently taken over as the lead designer on Neverwinter. As a bit of background, I was the content lead on Star Trek Online for several years, built Sword Coast Adventures, and recently completed my work as the lead designer on the Xbox One version of Neverwinter. I’m excited to dive into this new opportunity, and of course, the new challenges that come with it.

One of my first tasks, after getting settled with my new team, is to take a hard look at Elemental Evil and see what was done right and what needs improvement. I’m reading through all of the player feedback from a wide variety of sources, and forming a picture of where the game stands. In the coming weeks and months, our team will use this to shift Neverwinter from where it is now into what we feel is a far better place. Most of our goals are to make the game better by improving the aspects noted below, while others will bring the game closer to matching the growth of our players and our original vision for Neverwinter.

Here are some of the areas we’ll be looking at:

Overall difficulty

XP rewards in the new zones and campaign zones

Invocation

Hourly quests

Zone re-use

Removed dungeons

Campaign zone levels

Items missing slots/stats

And more...

I am still in the initial stages of my investigation. After that, I will determine which issues require changes so I can create a list of actionable items. Though both the investigation and work to resolve the issues will take time to get into the game, know that our goal is to get them tested and to you as soon as we possibly can. To that end, we are committed to making a change in the next weekly update. The amount of XP being rewarded by repeatable quests in our campaign areas is not consistent. We need to make some adjustments so that the experience gain from the repeatable quests in the Tyranny of Dragons campaign is in line with the other campaign zones. We are only reducing XP given by repeatable quests in the Tyranny campaign areas. Other quests are unaffected. I know this isn’t an ideal scenario, but to help compensate for this change we will be running our double XP event for an entire week, starting Thursday, April 23 and ending Thursday, April 30.

Along with all of this, we are continuing to fix bugs and improve the overall quality of life.

We are aware that mistakes were made with this release, and for that I would like to apologize. We understand the frustration and are actively working to make positive adjustments. Things won’t change immediately, but they will improve over time. Thank you for understanding and giving me the time to help identify and address the issues important to the community.

In an effort to continue to collect community feedback, we have opened and stickied this forum thread. Please feel free to comment in the thread as we keep an eye on community feedback for Neverwinter: Elemental Evil.